Man tries wearing smartwatches for a week, still finds them virtually useless

Is Silicon Valley deluding itself into thinking that smartwatches are going to be the next game-changing gadget? That certainly seems to be the case for the early generation of smartwathces, as New York Magazine’s Kevvin Roose tried wearing two different smartwatches at all times for a week and found them to be virtually useless.

“In the past week, I’ve been called ‘Inspector Gadget’ twice, had a near-calamitous accident involving spray-on sunblock, and felt my arm vibrate so often I started treating it as a phantom limb,” Roose writes. “I’ve been wearing two smartwatches for several days apiece, and so far, it’s been an enlightening experience. Though not necessarily a hopeful one.”

The big problem for Roose’s experience with smartwatches is that they don’t really do anything that his smartphone doesn’t already do as well or better. This is especially true of Samsung’s Gear 2 because it runs on Tizen and doesn’t have access to Google Now, which just happens to be one of the most useful smartwatch features of Android Wear. It also doesn’t help that all smartwatches for the time being are tethered to your smartphone’s data connection, which means that they can’t effectively work as standalone gadgets.

Roose does allow that smartwatches’ usefulness might improve as they become more of a hub for the “Internet of things” that will let us control all of our homes’ gadgets and appliances directly from our wrists. Until then, however, he doesn’t see why any normal person would need or even want to buy a smartwatch.